THE EQUALITY MACHINE

Enthusiastic yet measured argument for technology’s potential to promote equality across many facets of culture and industry.

Lobel, founding member of the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Markets at the University of San Diego, works from the twin premises that “equality is today’s foremost moral imperative” and that “we must understand technology as a public good.” The author catalogs emerging technologies that encourage diversity, accuracy, and empathy in fields historically plagued by bias and inequity, organizing her broad survey around economics, employment and labor, health care, media and education, sexuality, homes, and families. While ultimately optimistic about the future of technology, Lobel rejects the utopian-dystopian binary, viewing tech as neither good nor bad but rather an array of tools that can help solve human problems—though sometimes with unintended consequences. “To be sure,” writes the author, “the same technology can serve to support and to surveil, to learn and to manipulate, to heal and to harm, to detect and to conceal, to equalize and to exclude.” As extensions of humanity, algorithmic automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics show great potential to compensate for human shortcomings, but they also risk reinforcing them without proper standards for data and design. In an attempt to offer a progressive, business-friendly path forward, Lobel outlines a vision for guiding the ongoing integration of automation and AI into our daily lives with a different kind of tool: public policy. The author believes that by leveraging legal frameworks to establish equality-focused principles in tech development, we can “forg[e] humanity’s robotic future in an egalitarian image.” While some readers outside Lobel’s political lens may fault her premises or proposed direction—the final section recognizes and lightly dismisses potential criticisms—many will find the text a convincing road map to institutionally confirmed, technologically reinforced equality.

A compelling, hopeful, potentially divisive look at the future of technology and its ability to positively shape human life.